Lord McKenzie of Luton: My Lords, the Government support transparency. We encourage socially responsible investment and engagement. As my noble friend acknowledged, there is legislation covering statement of investment principles, and if that is not complied with it would be a matter for the Pensions Regulator. I think my noble friend would acknowledge that progress has been made. The FairPensions report itself acknowledges that. The Institutional Shareholders' Committee report indicates that since June 2002 there has been a dramatic increase in the number of UK institutional investors reporting votes—53 per cent of UK equities managed by UK institutional investors—but the effectiveness of that will be subject to review next year. And, of course, we have the NAPF review of miners, on which the Government have agreed to consult. There is a whole collection of things going on. The position is improving but there is more to do.

Baroness Andrews: My Lords, I begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, for giving us the opportunity to debate a very important topic. There is no one in this House who could have opened this debate or steered it implicitly like the noble Lord, for all the reasons colleagues on his Benches have made clear. The noble Lord has written a book; we are still leafing through the index to some extent. I am grateful for the breadth of his introduction because we have had a very thoughtful debate, as much about the context in which we conduct community policies as the policies themselves.
	It is a very useful and welcome opportunity for me to talk about what the Government are doing. Before I do so, I congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ely on his maiden speech. We are a small but very distinguished group in the Chamber this afternoon. The right reverend Prelate, having chosen to join us, has added lustre to the company. It was extremely significant that he spoke from his experience as somebody who knows—and, indeed, has written widely about—the rural community. I hope I can give him every assurance that the rural community is important to everything we say in the document and our policies. How could it be otherwise? The right reverend Prelate has worked to address isolation and bring people in from the margins, as he described it, through his position as chair of the Cambridgeshire branch of Action with Communities in Rural England. There is some excellent social enterprise work being done by the Ferry Project in Wisbech and the Huntingdonshire Youth Bank, which puts money directly into the hands of young people for them to decide how to spend it. That is the sort of example which might reassure the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, about young people's involvement in a range of voluntary organisations and their willingness to take responsibility and power.
	I am grateful for the support I detected for the action plan. I hope to prove that it is both a plan and full of action which will be taken. I very much agree with much of what has been said this afternoon. Noble Lords are absolutely right in their critique of language; the language in this field is very difficult indeed. I agree that "community empowerment" is a clumsy term. I wish there was something that we could all agree on which would mean everything that we would want it to mean. It is difficult to find a word that does that. We talk about community involvement and influence. Wherever possible, we should always use the simplest and most direct and common language. We really must address this, and I promise to do so. It is quite a well known term but we will go on looking for words which mean "enabling the people to become involved and influence the services and places they live in the best possible way". That is ultimately what we are talking about.
	Making this connection with the wider community will be a defining mark of this Government, making going beyond the town hall a clear priority and making practical propositions. That is one of the things that make it different and new. We are looking at a set of practical propositions in our action plan. I would not say that they are processes; they are new tools. Some are not that new, because they have been used and developed by the best councils, but bringing them together in a strategy plan is new.
	We have heard different versions of the personal journeys that noble Lords have made this afternoon, including, I am pleased to say, from my noble friend Lord Graham. They have been reflected by the Government's journey because things have changed from the days of mass protests, when getting involved meant going to a meeting. It is not like that any more and we must recognise and address that. Since 2000, we have been engaged on a genuine journey of devolution which started with Scotland and Wales and ended up before Christmas, via the local government White Paper and the Governance of Britain Green Paper, with a concordat between central and local government which consolidated that relationship. It was very seriously negotiated and not something where it was said "Let's do that because it'll look good" at all. It said, for the first time, that local and central government have a responsibility to use tax payers' money well, devolve power and engage and empower communities and individual citizens at local and national levels in debate, decision making, and shaping and delivering services. That is quite simple language.
	Behind and underneath all that is a set of problems which community engagement is designed to help us solve. Among them are the self-evident problems that noble Lords have addressed today in many different ways: the challenge of building trust and coherence in a complex, diverse and fragmented society, and in rural communities where isolation is often visible and yet invisible when one thinks about young people, for example. People who engage and are active in their communities build up what we call "social capital", enabling them to build communities, connect, and do and change things together.
	Secondly, there is the challenge of the democratic deficit. There is low participation in all forms of elections. The noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, talked about the ageing of the councillors; the average is 58.3 years, and only 3.5 per cent of councillors are under 30. One of the paradoxes is that there is no shortage of interest in how local government spends its money or provides services. There is evidence to suggest that the action plan and its actions can be made successful because people want to be informed and involved. Some 71 per cent of non-voters said they were likely to get involved in a process where they decided how and where local money is spent, and 80 per cent of people agree that they would engage more if they had been aware of the opportunity to do so, and given help and advice. Yes, we have that hierarchy where 15 per cent are very active and 15 per cent do not know or want to be involved. Yet there is, as the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, said, great potential for bringing in the community bystanders, not giving them tasks but enabling them to discover what they can do to change their communities.
	This is about designing, managing and changing policies and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, said, moving towards a shared understanding of where the problems are and so where the solutions are. One positive thing that takes us away from this suggestion that people will get involved only when they want to change or stop something is our experience in New Deal for Communities or our neighbourhood management. Ordinary people with skills they did not even know they had took on the responsibility for changing their communities, and have done so. We have seen, in those deprived and difficult communities, progress in the improvement of school standards, in the reduction of crime and in the improvement of housing and the environment. This has changed people's perceptions about the places in which they live. That is positive community involvement.
	I am sure the right reverend Prelate was right when he said that we recognise community when it is not there, but people I see when going to these communities are also very clear about what is changing and what is good about where they live. That is what we want to be able to spread. I note the assertion of the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, that nothing here is new. What is new about how we have approached this is that, first, involving people in helping find the solutions is now essential to what the Government are trying to do and the way they are trying to do it. I give all credit to the Secretary of State for making this a personal and political priority. It is certainly central to my department in the way we are trying to transform communities and the way we provide housing and new communities. The right reverend Prelate was right; of course we must not just build houses, and we do not intend to. It is a challenge to build communities where they do not exist and to change communities that do. Yet it is community planning—master-planning with the community resource and infrastructure at its heart—that will help us get from the beginning a sense of what the community wants. That is what we are trying to do.
	The second difference is that it is about direct levers. I will come on to illustrate that with a few examples. Thirdly, it is different because it is about the whole of Government. This is not something that the department which is called "Communities" has to deal with alone. We have to move this out across Whitehall. For example, in the youth action plan, the emphasis is put on young people making changes and giving them money as well as power to determine the sorts of facilities they want in their communities. There is the involvement of children in the children plan. The LINKs network in health is another radical change, going beyond the usual suspects to determine what is best in terms of social care. There is a sea change in the way the Government are drawing on these resources—because that is what they are.
	The action plan is ambitious; it is a major plan. It starts with the need for cultural change, the duty to involve a radical step which requires local authorities to show that they have involved the community. We recently published draft statutory guidance on both that and local strategic partnerships, and community strategies in relation to that. We are now looking for the best ways of doing that. The noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, referred to the 200 targets that are involved in many local authorities' decisions at the moment. There used to be 1,200 targets and we have made a quite significant change there. We will be consulting on draft regulations soon and guidance on the duty in the Sustainable Communities Act. But we in the department are also wrestling with the problem of the particular form of communities. I absolutely take the point that there are many different definitions of community, as there are many different types of communities—whether ethnic communities, communities of interest, or whatever.
	We are dealing with problems of community cohesion: the need to find ways to promote the sort of social engagement that enables the building of trust in communities which are very diverse. Our Connecting Communities fund is making that a reality by supporting the work of minority ethnic groups through community networks; for example, helping them to run citizens' days so that they get to know each other.
	On housing and planning, two Bills are coming forward from another place very shortly. The Housing Bill will give tenants and residents more power to shape their lives and their housing conditions. The Planning Bill, contrary to popular mythology, is creating more opportunity at three different stages of the planning process to involve people in what is happening in their communities. That is about creating different cultures and opening doors.
	We are also looking at widening and deepening opportunities locally. I have two examples. I know that asset transfer is close to the heart of the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, thereby creating opportunities for communities to manage and own local public buildings, village halls and community centres so that we have much more accessible community resources. Those are resources from which skills, opportunities and even jobs can be grown. Those are social enterprises. It is not only in instances such as Coin Street in London. In rural areas, we have Gamblesby in Cumbria, where the village hall has given the whole community a new focal point and a sense of purpose.
	If we move from that to participatory budgeting, we are looking at instances such as Bradford, where £1 million has been spent in five years: local people deciding how to spend money on local issues. That is why we announced 10 pilot areas in July and a further 12 last month, because we are ambitious for every local authority in the country to offer that within five years. I can say to the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, that those are not just words; this is real difference. It will work and it will happen, because people want it.
	We talked also about the need to improve services. You can do that in two ways—we have chosen two. Through local charters, which are more strategic, we want councils to work more visibly with the community as a whole. On the question raised by the noble Lord about what constitutes a community in that sense, it can be a community organisation or an alliance of community organisations. That will be determined locally. We are issuing guidance across the country in March for local authorities wanting to develop charters. Then there are petitions. I heard what the noble Baroness said, but she will know that we are building on the Councillors' Commission. I am sure that the consultative process will throw up many ideas and comments on that. We will publish responses on both those issues later this year, and we will draft legislation if necessary.
	All that will change, strengthen and galvanise local democracy, which is what it is intended to do. We also need to tackle the malaise in local government: the failures represented by ageing structures and the unattractiveness of a proposition that used to be so much connected with civic pride. That is where the Roberts commission has fitted in. We are now looking in detail at its recommendations, which are many and various, and will respond to it. What it says about local government is also being reflected in the work being done by the Darzi commission and the Flanagan review of the police force. How do we bring in more people, how do we get them to take responsibility for the things that really affect and harm their lives?
	We cannot do any of that unless we provide support mechanisms. I have a bit of jargon here. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, mentioned the network of empowering authorities, which is what it is. It is a core of 80 local authorities which will be the trailblazers for good practice. They will work together to spread the message: this is how things can change and work. We need those people to help us do that. They will not listen to us, but they will listen to local authorities who have done it for themselves. Alongside that we will have a national partnership of all those bodies which bring together ideas—the IDeA, the LGA, the Urban Forum—giving serious purpose to what will actually enthuse, galvanise and mobilise people. We have community anchor organisations as well.
	My noble friend asked how you measure success. That is a very important question. Public Service Agreement No. 21 seeks to build more cohesive, active and empowered communities. We will not only be seeking to meet that target; we are also finding new ways of measuring participation, both active and passive. We are doing a citizenship survey, for example, to look at everything from school governorship to who and how many sign local petitions. Through the national census of local authority councillors, we will be measuring the profile of councillors. Noble Lords are also right to ask about resources. These are not simply words; they are not even simply good ideas. There will be investment in this—£35 million has been committed to underpin the action plan.
	Having gone through rather rapidly and superficially what is in this plan and what it signifies, I hope noble Lords agree that what is different is that there are new opportunities. There is a new seriousness, a new centrality of purpose. There are ways of enthusing people, young and old, in these programmes and of holding out a better future. There is connectivity between the range of things that local government can do and what the community wants to do for itself. We can open doors. It is uncomfortable but we have to face those realities. If we have the principles and some of the processes right, and the ambition, we can actually do it. As for making community a reality, to return to where the right reverend Prelate started, if we can recognise in five years' time a community by what it has rather than by what it has lost, we will be on the way to making genuine change.